What does America look like right now?  I have been toying with comparisons with Rome, but there is a comparison much closer to home.  I’m going to paraphrase a description from Wikipedia, can you identify the country and the time period?

The state was nearing bankruptcy and outlays outpaced income. XXXXXXX realized that the country’s extremely regressive tax system subjected the lower classes to a heavy burden, while numerous exemptions existed for the [very rich] and clergy. He argued that the country [lower classes] could not be taxed higher; that tax exemptions for the nobility and clergy must be reduced; and proposed that borrowing more money would solve the country’s fiscal shortages.

The guy in the ‘XXXXX’s failed in getting his reforms passed and the government collapsed less than 3 years later.  And, in time, it became a blood bath with most of the ‘upper’ classes either fleeing the country or beheaded.

Yes, I’m talking about France.  And the fact that the government was broke because of King Louis’ escapades in the 7 years war just put the cherry on the top of this comparison for me.

I know there are differences.  But the fundamental issue at stake now in America are the massive separation between mega rich and everyone else.  When it gets right down to it, what is really the difference between a King and a Koch Brother?  Can you buy an army and a government?

Regulated capitalism works.  But businesses cannot write their own rules (and they do now).  The government must be a reflection of the will of the people, not just the people born with a golden thermometer up their ass.

Watch this TED presentation. Go ahead, I dare you.

Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies | Video on TED.com.

What I thought was telling was that the places with the greatest income equality have the highest standards of living for the most people. John F. Kennedy said, “A rising tide lifts all boats”, and this is clearly laid out in the data collected by Richard Wilkinson and his colleagues. The second thing I found provocative in this talk was the fact that income fairness is the most important factor regardless of how that fairness is achieved.

A CEO in Japan making 350 times what the ‘normal’ people make is seen as obscene by that culture.  It is CULTURAL pressure that keeps people on the rails.  In Sweden, it is taxation.

I spoke with my good friend Ron today following the eviction of occupy wall street from Liberty Square in New York and he doesn’t think the revolution will happen yet.  My take on this is that unless the revolution happens now, it will happen within the next 10 years and it will be bloody.

This isn’t about rich versus poor.  This is about some of the rich removing the possibility of a decent living.  How can you move up in society through dint of hard work and intelligence if the cats at the top are changing the rules to make your labor worthless, to take your money through predatory lending, to burden you with tax rates higher than their own?  You cannot.

This is what I hope OWS does.  I hope it raises the awareness of America to the fact that their politicians are for sale and that they have been outbid.

This is audio only, but you need to understand the historical context of Occupy Wall Street and the Populist movement.

Prophetic article calling for the occupation Part 1 – Majority Report – YouTube.

I’m going to lift a piece of the definition directly from Wikipedia:

Meaning

The metaphor illustrates the argument that free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately reduces the resource through over-exploitation, temporarily or permanently. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are borne by all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than those who are exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball to the point that the resource is depleted (even if it retains a capacity to recover). The rate at which depletion of the resource is realized depends primarily on three factors: the number of users wanting to consume the common in question, the consumptiveness of their uses, and the relative robustness of the common.^{[original article]}

A common argument I hear against the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency in America) is that it raises the cost of doing business to protect seemingly stupid things. “Did you know they shut down a huge oil field in Texas to protect a lizard?” [reference] And this argument, while true on the surface, kind of misses the point of the EPA.

The EPA is a government institution, created by a fabric of laws and regulations, to address a very real problem in a Free Market. The problem in a free market is the tragedy of the commons. That is to say, if I can shift the costs of my business to everyone else with no penalty, I MUST do so in a free market because a purely free market has no incentive to look out for anybody else but myself.

What do I mean by ‘shifting the costs’? Let’s say I’m running a nice chemical plant that makes a nice chemical used by other industries. And let’s say that one of the by-products of my process produces a slightly toxic and entirely useless sludge. In a pure free market, it is in my best interest to get rid of that sludge in the cheapest way possible. The cheapest way is to dump it in a river. I, myself, no longer have to bear the cost of cleaning up this chemical, so I win! But the towns downstream pay the cost instead in higher disease rates, lower fish populations, lower quality of life, loss of tourism, etc etc etc. THAT is what a pure free market gets you with no rules and regulation.

The EPA is a governmental organization that was meant to create a societal good (clean up the environment) while at the same time to prevent people from shifting part of their costs onto the public. Back in my hypothetical chemical company, the EPA shows up, makes me pay to clean up the mess I made and install controls and treatment processes to keep that sludge from harming everyone else. The cost of doing business goes up for me.

But the COST WAS ALREADY THERE.

The cost has just been shifted from the public (those towns downstream) back to me. This is MORE JUST than letting me piss that sludge over the rest of society and telling them to clean it up.

Ideally, that is what the EPA does. It keeps the air and water clean for society by keeping individuals from messing it up for everyone else. The EPA has been quite effective in this regard. Water and air purity increased dramatically throughout the late 70′s, 80′s, and 90′s. Smog disappeared or was drastically reduced in several urban areas and many waterways became safe to go near without a gas mask.

The EPA is a governmental organization. As so often happens with governmental action, there is a problem with the Law of Unintended Consequences. There are indeed cases where the laws, as applied, make no sense. I am fully willing to concede that point. But the correct response to this is to fix the laws, not throw them out.

The current Republican-led House is passing bill after bill to throw the baby out with the bath water [mother jones article]. And Koch brothers-funded astroturf organizations are gearing up to stop any new regulations from getting on the books [regulation of power plant emissions].

This leads us to my conclusion:
EPA = Good
EPA = Human construct that sometimes gets things wrong

The biggest “Problem” I see with the EPA is that organizations (purely free market constructs with no consciousness and completely amoral) have the right to buy politicians. Those politicians are now trying to change laws (you do remember that the EPA is a ‘fabric of laws’, right?) to please those who are paying them to be re-elected.

There is a trilogy called ‘Stark’s War’ by John G. Hemry. It was John’s first published book (at least, I think so) and is a good science fiction story extrapolating what he thought the future might look like if current trends in politics and the military kept going in the same direction. John was a naval officer and he seems to be intelligent and conscientious. I have only his own words to go on, I did no research on this guy.

That first paragraph is to give you a frame for the rest of this post, because, in the last book of that trilogy, something very similar to Occupy Wall Street happened.

Occupy Wall Street | NYC Protest for American Revolution.

The deal is this, without a power base, OWS will ultimately fail. OWS relies on the lawful functioning of government and of those in power. And, I think we can all agree, that is not happening. Voting laws are being rewritten in America to disenfranchise people (especially the working poor and minorities). Law enforcement agencies are taking blatant bribes to ignore or break the laws they are supposed to uphold. Our government officials have cravenly turned their back on the society they are supposed to represent and now kowtow to the moneyed interests who keep them in power. Our media outlets have been subverted by fear mongering liars and there is no accountability to be found.

No.

For OWS to succeed, they must appeal directly to the military. They must ask the military to uphold the constitution and allow peaceful assemblies of people. This isn’t the Vietnam era military and these protesters are not military-hating hippies. And it is ONLY through cooperation that OWS can resist the current power structure.

Without that cooperation, OWS is just basically asking the bad guys to stop being bad. That will not happen.

I thought the question from the moderator to Ron Paul with the hypothetical man in a coma with no insurance was telling. The short answer from all of the republican contenders is, ‘let him die’.

But I can see the huge philosophical hole in the position of the far right:

If the man with a coma is a corporation, then the government should step in and help him out.

Is there a huge disconnect in the minds of these candidates?  Is it conscious?

America is at a crossroads, a universal increase in quality of life is achievable right now.  The thing preventing that across the board better life is a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchy.

So, the real question is:

Do you want to live in a society where 90% of the population is living in shit so that 10% have a fantastic life?

Or do you want to live in a society where everyone has a decent life (good health, education, and equitable rights)?

Republicans seem to want option A because if you have money, if you are in the 10%, you are a better person and more deserving than everyone else.

You are in the 90%.  You will not become one of the 10%.  Not now, not ever, not your children, or their children.  Class mobility doesn’t exist any more and will not exist if fundamental changes are not made to the way the US government makes and enforces its laws and in the way government officials are elected for office.

“Always make your laws as if you were the weaker party.”

or “You will not always be on top”

or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”

Arghh!  And here I was saying, just a few weeks ago, that I was going to stop paying attention to politics.  That didn’t work out so well.

There’s no reason for us to keep beating around the bush.  Large corporations have been declared as having first amendment rights, they pay a much lower tax rate than normal humans and are, essentially, immortal.  Even corporations that ‘die’ really don’t, there assets, people, and product lines are simply purchased and folded into some other corporate entity.

Corporate money is corrupting politics and twisting our regulations to their own benefit.  This corruption is insidious and harmful to us all.  The best solution is to remove this one-off influence from political discourse.

It follows that since corporations have so many advantages over normal citizens, that they be given that most essential right of voting.

I propose the Electoral Simplification and Financial Easement Act.

The ESFE Act allows corporate entities the right to votes through proxy agreements.  It allows the legal transfer of your voting rights to another entity (corporation) for some compensation.

Simply sell your vote to a corporation for cold hard cash.

Why go through all the bother of voting?  Why pay attention to what is happening in the news?  Do YOU have the time and energy to follow all of the ins and outs of what is happening on the floor of the House and Senate?  No, it’s just a hassle and corporations have the resources and energy to do these very complicated things.

Contact your senator and representative today, for hopefully the last time, and support the ESFE Act when it comes up for a vote in the next election (for the last time).

It’s time that we, as a nation, fast forward through this murky and difficult time to get straight to the final result.

Why put yourself through the pain of a long fight that you will lose?

Give up.

There was a program on the BBC last Friday (they rebroadcast it this evening) trying to analyze the cause of the riots. What was surprising to me was the perfect archetypes they were able to find for the camera

There was the obligatory “hoody” wearer expressing zero remorse or concern for his actions.
The angry and upset shop keeper who had his hard work smashed or stolen.
The announcer amazed that the hoody wearer didn’t feel remorse.

AND

The moral relativist saying that riots happen occasionally and it’s just part of life.

But what I heard (and read, because I leave the subtitles on) was the word control. Over and over, every member on that screen used that word, but seemed to not understand that they were saying it.

The police didn’t have control.
The rioters felt like they were in control.
The shopkeepers felt like they had no control when confronted with a mob.

Control Control Control

It’s always been the case that if a police force is made up of human beings then their control is illusory. Police are outnumbered on the streets of every city by a factor of 10,000. Police are there to protect us from ourselves, to calm down the situation, to give us some hope that justice matters, to keep the dark side of our nature (hopefully) in the dark.

But a police force unwilling or unable to use serious force can’t do a whole lot against a mob.

The rioters were not stupid or evil, it wasn’t because their parents were not strict enough. It had nothing to do with stealing money to feed their family. It was an expression of collective anger. You see on the news that “the rich” (there is always a ‘them’) steal millions or billions and walk away with a small fine for being so cheeky. While you and your mates can go to jail because you are standing in the wrong place and you have to BE somewhere but there are no jobs for you to BE at. When you are that far down, having a little control can be a powerful drug.

Censoring social media sites will not solve this problem. That IS stupid, because there are a thousand other sites that will spring up to replace them.
A curfew or stricter enforcement will just make the anger come back quicker and harder next time.

No, the cause of the London Riots has the same root as all societal problems and until we can figure out how to fix those problems we can all look forward to more of this in the future.

I promised myself several days ago that I was going to cut back on the news and political commentary programs I take in, it was making me mad.

Maybe I should tweet about that, a personality questionnaire that rhymes:

Political news makes me:

1.  Sad
2.  Mad
3.  Glad
4.  I don’t watch that shit

I have been trying to focus on the job, personality testing and research and statistics.  These things are interesting to me, they really are.  But when I go home at the end of the day I look at my son and I’m thinking to myself that he’s going to have to grow up in this world, what have I done to make it better for him?

And the scariest thought is that there isn’t a conspiracy, that the other side isn’t confused or evil, they are honestly trying to make things better too.  I think that no one knows the answers and we are all just as uncertain and upset about what is happening in the world around us.

Doesn’t that frighten you?

That the other side (whichever side that is to you) loves their country and wants people to be happy and safe.

That we are all after the same things and desperately struggling to make it happen, but just can’t agree on a single way to get there.

Saw a TED conference presentation about that.

That made a lot of sense to me.

So I think the key is understanding that the other side of the argument probably isn’t ignorant or evil.  That two human beings with the same data can come to different conclusions and that sometimes the best strategy is to try several different strategies until one comes out on top.

There are a few hundred countries and political systems in the world.  Why don’t we look at the world today and see it as a human experiment in humanity.

And the purpose of this experiment is to find the best path to happy.

We should be looking at all of the countries in the world, trying to figure out which model works best (most happiness for most people) and then franchising it.